The Raped Girl Cannot Be Left Alone!
- Category: Gender
- Date 08-01-2006
- 442 views
One could not avoid being thunderstruck by the rape incident of a young schoolgirl reported in this Paper towards the close of last year. For a 15year old pupil to be raped by a three-man gang for two uninterrupted days is an unnerving episode: traumatising and haunting not only to the young girl as a victim but also by extension to the parents, as a secondary injured party. The trio of the Arusha-based rapists: Mikidadi Abeid (20), Kisia Atanatus (23), and Nelson Emily (24) were reportedly apprehended and produced in court. (See: Three arrested over pupil abduction, rape – Sunday Citizen 27th November 2005, page 3).
The suspected rapists were accused of kidnapping the schoolgirl, keeping her incommunicado for two days as they raped her in turns. The teenage girl, a student of Kimandolu Secondary School in the precincts of Arusha city, was seized while she was leaving her school to take her year-end vacation, like all her peers countrywide.
This rape incident touches at the core of the very conduct of today’s youth; how they transact their business and generally relate.
Numerous assumptions must be at play, notwithstanding the hideousness of the act by the rapist hoodlums. I have had occasion to reflect on the story as it was reported, and also to thrash out the implications of the deed both by the implicated yobbos and the raped victim, to an extent that some people feel that if anyone had to apportion blame, then the victim too must take her share of it.
Firstly, more and more children are becoming sexually active today, more so if they are female. Someone has suggested that the young girl in question might never have been obliged by the suspected rapists to stay with them at the house from where they were apprehended in the first place. She could have wandered off her course, venturing into their residence on her own volition.
The three rapists, all in their early twenties, shamelessly took hostage of a vulnerable youngster and defiled her with impunity. That they saw no problem doing so is an ugly pointer. It mirrors a gawking abyss at the core of this society’s moral fabric.
It brings into question our value system, imparted in the young members of our society in preparation for the attainment adulthood that streams with dignity. And the foundation for value systems lies at the family level, whereas schools and religious institutions are secondary players in imparting morals.
A commentator has observed that it took the parents of the raped girl to search for their missing daughter, alerting the police, and then some “good Samaritans” volunteered information about her whereabouts. The victim herself had not whimpered in protest against her continued detention to attract the attention of rescuers. She did complain about her ordeal! Perhaps she would have walked home with contrived innocence thereafter.
One could argue that the general behaviour of young girls serves to attest to this assertion; extreme as it seems. They are offensive in character, which often exposes them to avoidable danger. Being adolescents, they can be emotionally rickety, unable to keep their radiant sexual desires within appreciable limits. Thus they can easily fall prey to exploitative men whose moral deportment is quite suspicious.
In the foregoing case, the culprits were arrest by police to face court. However, the last and least qualified body to enforce proper human conduct are the police and courts of law. At the criminal level, the court and police can be relied on to apprehend and punish wrongdoers – but that is all! The real remedy remains with the appropriate parties namely the family, school, religious, and other social institutions.
Finally however, let the defiler rapists be subjected to the rigours of prison life and face the full force of the law. Even if the girl might have ‘consented’ to sex, she could not have contemplated the devastating effect of the act; moreover, “the fox must be chased away first and then a hen warned against wandering in the bush”.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen